The first installment of Netflix's true crime documentary anthology, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, directed by Joe Berlinge has so far been met with mixed to negative reviews. Berlinger, known his true crime documentaries, Paradise Lost and Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, tackles the history of Los Angeles's notorious Cecil Hotel and the investigation into the tragic death of Elisa Lam in a way that seems to strangely bury the truth in the name of sensationalizing conspiracy theories and the chase.
Built in 1927 and once a luxury destination, the Cecil Hotel fell on hard times in the 50's when LA's disastrous "containment policy" for the homeless placed it right at the edge of what is known as skid row. It became a cheap place for people to stay who had nowhere else to go. It's rumored to have been one of the last known locations of Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia, and was the residences of two serial killers, Richard Ramirez, aka The Night Stalker, and Jack Unterweger who had strangled three sex workers in one of the rooms. Perhaps the best known death, and the one that captured the imaginations of Internet sleuths all over, was that of twenty-one-year-old Canadian college student, Elisa Lam. Lam had been traveling on her own when she disappeared, and the only clue she left behind was an elevator's security footage where she exhibited strange behavior. Nineteen days after her death, she was found in the hotel water tank after guests complained that the water pressure was low and the water had a strange color and taste.
The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel follows the investigation into her death and the various conspiracy theories that sprang from it and the notorious location. At the time of writing, it sits on Rotten Tomatoes at a critic score of 57% and an audience score of 27%. The general consensus is that the documentary struggles to walk the line between telling a gripping story about a fascinating historical landmark and falling into the traps of salacious storytelling and that the final episode was the strongest with its meta commentary on the nature of true crime. Here's what some of the reviews had to say:
This is the type of storytelling the Cecil attracts — somewhere between "tawdry" and "trashy" — and it's the type of storytelling that Joe Berlinger dabbles in for at least 80 percent of his four-part Netflix documentary series Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. That Berlinger ultimately offers a more substantive critique of both the Cecil's legacy and our collective true-crime obsession may disappoint viewers who crave the trash and infuriate viewers who have to wade through so much of the trash to get to the thoughtful stuff.
The basic facts of Lam’s death are so upsetting, that Crime Scene’s various attempts to lighten the mood with historical detours and commentary from cutesy eccentrics such as the general manager with the Veronica Lake wave, feel, at best, in very poor taste. It is not spooky, it is just sad; desperately sad that a family have lost their beloved daughter and sad, too, that in Los Angeles, as in many other places around the world, the result of human beings in a mental health crisis is avoidable tragedy.
It’s a shame that it takes so long for the show to understand what makes this particular crime scene compelling — or, even worse, that it relishes validating the most salacious details and theories before deigning to do its case, and the woman at its center, true justice.
True crime is something of a fraught genre, partly because people love a good mystery, and the setup truly is like something out of a horror story, which is interesting given the Cecil Hotel's link to American Horror Story. However, it is also often all-too-easy to get caught up in the strange or salacious that some forget that there were real people involved. Elisa Lam had a family and friends that love and miss her. This happened less than a decade ago, and with all the controversy and conspiracies that surrounded her death, the wound likely hasn't even scabbed over, let alone healed. In the final episode, Berlinger reveals that her death was a tragic accident; no conspiracy, no cover-up, no murder. He confronts the inherently voyeuristic nature of the true crime genre and the mundane evils of society's treatment of the homeless and mentally ill, but it's almost too little too late. After three hours of making the Cecil Hotel look like the Overlook, to then use Crime Scene to make commentary about the obsession with true crime feels a bit like he's trying to have his cake and eat it too.